Archive for the ‘Owosso Michigan’ tag

When Bill Mitchell scoured the country in the early 1990s to collect examples of every car his father, Don, had a hand in, he had a sizable task ahead of him. After all, Don Mitchell was behind Ionia Manufacturing and Mitchell-Bentley and built numerous woodies, station wagons, concept cars and prototypes for Detroit’s automakers from the 1930s through the 1960s. Bill accomplished his task, and now 20 years later his collection will head to auction.

William F. “Bill” Mitchell (no relation to GM design chief William L. “Bill” Mitchell), who died in April at the age of 87, had worked for his father since 1947 and took over the reins of the company in 1972, but it was his father who would ultimately be christened “Michigan’s station wagon king” for his successes building the wagon for all of Detroit’s Big Three. Don Mitchell, a body engineer by training, but a salesman by trade, worked for a handful of Michigan auto suppliers until forming his own engineering firm in 1932. Four years later, he stepped in to help turn around Ypsilanti Reed Furniture Company of Ionia, Michigan, which he would eventually reorganize in 1942 as Ionia Manufacturing, with himself as president of the company.

Under Mitchell’s guidance, Ionia began building wooden station wagon bodies for General Motors in 1938 and then again after World War II, starting with Chevrolet and Pontiac from 1946 through 1948, then Buick from 1949 through 1954. At the same time, Ionia supplied wood body components to Ford for the 1946-1947 Ford and Mercury Sportsman convertibles and to Chrysler for its 1946-1948 Town and Country models. Around 1951, Ionia’s designers even took a crack at what would become the M-151 MUTT, though production contracts for the light jeep would ultimately go to other manufacturers.

After Detroit’s automakers switched from wooden to metal station wagon bodies, Mitchell continued to supply automakers with station wagon bodies. In 1954, the company produced the Dodge Sierra’s four-door station wagon bodies by lengthening the factory-built two-door bodies; it then built all of Buick’s station wagon bodies from 1954 through 1964 and all of Oldsmobile’s station wagon bodies from 1957 through 1964.

“At that time he was the world’s largest independent producer of station wagon bodies,” said Don Nemets, caretaker of the Bill Mitchell collection. “At Ionia’s peak, it employed 20,000 people.”

Mitchell expanded Ionia in the mid-1950s by merging it with the Owosso Manufacturing Company and renaming it Mitchell-Bentley, which would go on to supply automotive trim, build at least most of the Continental Mark II bodies for Ford Motor Company, and experiment with fiberglass automobile bodies.

One of the more prominent of those experiments, the 1954 Dodge Granada concept car, came about due to Mitchell’s partial ownership in Creative Industries of Detroit. At about the same time that Chrysler had Briggs produce the Bill Robinson-designed Plymouth Belmont out of fiberglass components – similar to how steel-bodied cars are typically produced by welding together multiple steel panels – Dodge President Bill Newberg wanted a fiberglass concept car molded in a single unit. Chrysler design chief Virgil Exner credited Briggs with styling the concept car, but actual production of the Dodge Granada fell to Creative Industries, which placed it on a Dodge chassis and powered it with a 150-hp, 241-cu.in. Dodge Red Ram Hemi V-8.

After Mitchell-Bentley sold Ionia in 1964, Mitchell reorganized the company again as the Mitchell Corporation, supplying stampings, interiors, and trim. Don Mitchell died in 1972, and Bill Mitchell kept the company going until his death, though he had sold off the manufacturing portion of the company in the 1990s.

The collection he assembled in tribute to his father would go on to become the Mitchell Car Museum – located in a Mitchell-Bentley building in Owosso – and include plenty of Ionia-bodied station wagons, a couple of Continental Mark IIs, a MUTT or two, a Creative Industries-built fiberglass-bodied Packard-powered Mitchell Panther, a fiberglass-bodied 1964 Buick Wildcat, the restored Dodge Granada, and several Mitchell cars built from 1903 to 1923 in Racine, Wisconsin, by a distant family relative. Though rarely open to the public – Nemets said it was mostly for family and friends, open to the public only for charity events – Bill Mitchell still curated it more like a topical museum than like a warehoused collection.

While Bill Mitchell did sell a handful of cars from the museum before his death – most notably the fiberglass Wildcat and the Mitchell Panther – 27 vehicles and a few bodies remain and will sell at no reserve at auction next month. Troy Crowe, a spokesperson for Sheridan Auctions, which is handling the sale, said the Mitchell family chose not to continue to run the museum because of the costs associated with it. “So it’s just a matter of settling the estate now,” he said. Bidding for the Granada will start at $25,000, while bidding for the rest of the vehicles will start at $5,000.

The auction will take place August 20 just down the road from the museum (which is too small to accommodate an auction) at Baker College in Owosso. For more information, visit SheridanAuctionService.com.